


To rest a weary soul

by Goonlalagoon



Series: Just a bunch of kids with badges [10]
Category: Leagues and Legends - E. Jade Lomax
Genre: A lot of the others appear in mentions but it's mostly Rupe, Gen, I was doing sprints for NaNo and I started thinking about Rupert and concepts of home, his mum gets enough mention as well that I tagged her
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-14
Updated: 2020-11-14
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:02:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,639
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27557317
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Goonlalagoon/pseuds/Goonlalagoon
Summary: Some mornings, he expects to see the narrow walls of a Bureau storage cupboard, but he listens to the voices drifting up from the street, familiar laughter from the rooms below, feels the blanket curled over his shoulders, until he can convince himself it’s safe to open his eyes.(Rupert, in the aftermath of Remember the Dust)
Series: Just a bunch of kids with badges [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/773520
Comments: 5
Kudos: 7





	To rest a weary soul

**Author's Note:**

> Title from 'Home', by Eliza & Sarah Wolcott
> 
> 'Home is a safe, a calm retreat,  
> To rest the weary soul;  
> Home makes one's happiness complete,  
> Where love commands the whole. '

When the battles are done, Rivertown claimed and the Bureau licking their wounds, Rupert wades through the aftermath with a clipboard and pen for weeks. He has lists of the injured and dead to help process, damages to structures to inventory, agreements for aid to file. Schedules to adjust, because while they’ve won, nobody trusts the Bureau an inch so they’re still running a loose sentry detail - they want there to always be a few people on hand for emergencies, too, because more than one building that was only just standing as the dust started to settle has collapsed since. Sez has a never ending stream of informants scuttling by, and Rupert transcribes for her to pass on messages and warnings and requests.

They won, but Rupert’s a historian at heart, still, a bureaucrat as much as he’s a hero (and he’s very good at both) - he knows that the aftermath of this will be a lifetime, and then some.

He files his paperwork in Sally-Anne’s converted storeroom, and pads back up the stairs to the room they’ve given him - it’s the room that once was Sally’s brother’s, but the folded blanket on the end of the bed is one his mother brought him back years ago from one of her trips. He’d retrieved it from his room at the Academy, while he was still processing that the technically disallowed single room was still so clearly his. He’d expected to have to dig through boxes in his Uncle’s rooms to find it, but it had been laid neatly over the end of the bed just as he’d left it when they set out for the mountains.

The room at Sally-Anne’s isn’t _his,_ not really, and he doesn’t think it ever will be - but it had seen him through weeks of recovery, a rebellion, and it will see him through the first long weeks of the aftermath. His mother had set up a camp-bed in the corner, and when neither of them can sleep they tell stories back and forth about the constellations they can see out of the little window, or make shadow pictures on the wall the way they had on summer expeditions when he was a child. Some mornings, before he wakes fully, he expects to open his eyes to the patched canvas of his mother’s faithful tent and the feel of damp ground under the groundsheet.

Some mornings, he expects to see the narrow walls of a Bureau storage cupboard, but he listens to the voices drifting up from the street, familiar laughter from the rooms below, feels the blanket curled over his shoulders, until he can convince himself it’s safe to open his eyes.

Weeks after, when things seem at least vaguely under control again, Miz Eliza packs the tent into a borrowed truck and they drive out of Rivertown for a weekend. They don’t go far, responsibilities waiting and everyone still twitchy about extended absences, but they both wanted to go far enough to see the horizon spreading out around them.

Laney had offered to port them out somewhere, but that wasn’t the point, really. It wasn't about the distance - it was the journey, rattling along in a truck knowing they’d stop where they found something interesting, watching the world change around them. It was about knowing that he could go anywhere he liked, he just had to point out the direction.

Rupert liked things to be organised and reliable, and this was something people often didn’t understand: his mother was only unpredictable from the outside. They’d established patterns over the years and knew their own routines. She might not know exactly where she was going to stop, but she knew what she was looking for and how she was going to set things up when she got there. She’d let him pack the car because he knew how best to fit everything in, but all of her stuff was always in the same place as well - it just didn’t include things he rather thought of as essentials. She knew how to plan for uncertainty, however much as he needed her to, and he had always known he could rely on her.

They pitch the tent in a field with a half collapsed drystone wall and a nice view, and stay up late making shadow pictures on the canvas, old favourites and new jokes. In the morning, Rupert boils water on the battered camp stove with an equally battered whistling kettle, and they chew on cereal bars while the steam drifts into the hazy blue sky, chipped mugs cradled in calloused palms, watching the dew gradually fade as the sun rises.

This isn’t a research trip, but they hike along a rabbit run alongside the old wall anyway, poking at stones and talking about anything and everything. They don’t talk about the past months - they will, he knows, but they know each other well enough that they don’t have to agree not to dwell on it now. Now he wants to ramble through fields and pause to watch a rabbit as it eyes them warily, deciding if they’re friends or foe, to listen to his mother talk about her latest research trip. He’d spent his childhood at the Academy, learning the rules and making himself part of the framework, but he’d spent his holidays (odd weekends and unexpected weeks) exploring at his mother’s side. For all that he was at home in the hallowed halls of the Academy or the worn, warm interior of Sally-Anne’s, the alleys of Rivertown, there was always a part of him that tipped it’s head back when he stepped out into the open air and an unknown view and breathed deep.

There are plants growing up through the cracks in the stone that he wouldn’t have known the name of before, familiar now from long evenings of testing Jack on his local herblore. Bees bumble between stems, and he recites everything he remembers about their methods of communicating the location of food aloud as they walked, catching himself more than once thoughtlessly imitating Grey’s hand waving and gestures; George had taught him a mountain tune that she tended to whistle while reading papers, and he finds it spilling from his lips as they wander, and the thick jumper he’s bundled up in for the morning chill has careful warming charms worked into it that Laney had scowled over for hours alongside a patient hedgewitch prepared to spare a trick or two. They were all parts of him too, nowadays, and he’d spent months with them as far out of his reach as any other part of his home.

They rattle back into Rivertown a day later than planned, mud splattered but with a tension Rupert had forgotten he was holding gone from his shoulders. In another few weeks they travel further, back to the desert and it’s rolling dunes, another open horizon that Rupert has known and loved for years, even if it is less familiar than the rooftop view from his Academy dorm. Miz Eliza waves as they set off home, burying herself in her research again, sending him rambling letters of anecdotes and pictures of crude pottery, and he sends back clockwork care packages that she smiles over every time.

The room at Sally-Anne’s is always open to him, but he finds that he’s missed having Jack, Laney and Grey at nothing but a staircase away, so he joins them in hunting for apartments in between the work of helping to set up an independent city state and pulling together copies of all the first-hand accounts of the First League he could find for George (he had grown up with a mother in love with ancient, fragile things: he knew the light in an academic’s eyes when they felt the siren song of new research calling them, and he knows possibly before she does that she’d be heading back to the University soon)

The flat they settle into is probably too small for four, and is definitely too small for how often they actually had a rotating cast of visitors - George, of course, but also the Farris cousins sneaking out of the rebuilding Academy for a weekend visit, a few of Red’s extended family who need a place to stay while visiting their recovering kin, odd friends who drop by and stay too late to bother venturing homeward in the dark or the rain. But it’s comfortable, a little cluttered and ramshackle, odds and ends of mismatched furniture and in progress DIY - it’s _theirs._

The room Jack and Grey claim has fragrant herbs drying by the window and a crowded shelf of Grey’s favourite books, Jack’s favourite of the pictures Bidi had sent him over the years tacked onto the side of the shared wardrobe - if Rupert leans on the doorframe and closed his eyes, he could have been back in the Academy, waiting to see if he was invited in to claim the unused desk, for all that nowadays Jack had claimed the lower bunk. Laney and Rupert had their own rooms, though there had been a fiercely polite argument over which of them took the larger one (Laney had won, unsurprisingly, so Rupert’s is the only room large enough to have its own desk in the corner). Laney had brought back patterned rugs from the desert, old familiar patterns that she’d been pretending she wasn’t missing, and scattered them through the apartment to cover the worn wooden floors.

There are new hedgewitch knitted blankets slung over the back of the sofa and an old one folded neatly on the foot of Rupert’s bed. The view out of the window isn’t an open horizon or the rooftops of a distant town, but that doesn’t matter; he wakes in the mornings and knows that he is home.


End file.
